Business Development

Marketing is Storytelling

A client sent me this yesterday. It's a single, six-minute shot of a man walking along a road in what looks like Scotland, telling the story behind a brand. This clip is instructive on two levels. First, it's technically really impressive -- the timing is perfect, the delivery is terrific, and it's a masterful work of film making.

Equally impressive, however, is the demonstration of the importance of storytelling in marketing. Steve Jobs' presentations are brilliant at this. Too many marketers just announce things, or spew out facts and assume people will notice and/or care. They won't. People need stories -- characters, plot, a beginning, middle and end, and a certain amount of showmanship. That's what this piece has in spades. The subtitles, by the way, are annoying, but definitely help Americans process the Scottish accent. Enjoy. 

Dunbar's Law, Your Brain, and The Limits of Social Media Marketing

Seth Godin just wrote a really interesting post about the size of one's network, or as he refers to it, the "tribe". The magic number, apparently, is 150 and it's known as Dunbar's Law or Dunbar's Number. Dunbar based this number on the processing power of the human brain -- he theorized that we just don't have the brainpower, as a species, to handle a larger number.

Here's a quote from Seth's post:

Dunbar postulated that the typical human being can only have 150 friends. One hundred fifty people in the tribe. After that, we just aren't cognitively organized to handle and track new people easily. That's why, without external forces, human tribes tend to split in two after they reach this size. It's why WL Gore limits the size of their offices to 150 (when they grow, they build a whole new building)...

Some people online are trying to flout Dunbar's number, to become connected and actual friends with tens of thousands of people at once. And guess what? It doesn't scale. You might be able to stretch to 200 or 400, but no, you can't effectively engage at a tribal level with a thousand people. You get the politician's glassy-eyed gaze or the celebrity's empty stare. And then the nature of the relationship is changed.

I can tell when this happens. I'm guessing you can too.

A few thoughts about this:

• First, I'm willing to bet that the vast, vast majority of professionals, even those who pride themselves on being effective networkers, have nowhere near 150 real contacts. My take on this, which is more than a little biased, is that unless you have that many, you really have no excuse not to work on growing your network. You can do it.

• Second, this concept nicely illustrates the difference between, say, LinkedIn contacts or Facebook friends, and networking contacts. It's very possible to manage thousands of people on Facebook, but the relationship you have with them is broader and shallower than a true networking connection. That doesn't mean it's better or worse, but it does mean that it's a different kind of relationship.

• 150 is about the size of a standard law-school section. Interesting.

Some Lessons in Gratitude

I am spending the week in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, a leafy suburb of Philadelphia.  It’s fall here, the air is cool and the trees are changing color.  As I walked along, my destination was Curtis Arboretum, which was donated to the county by the family that founded and published The Saturday Evening Post.  On the way, I passed several incredible houses.  This area was extremely prosperous a century ago, and many of the houses are enormous, built of stone, and have broad, sweeping lawns.  If these houses were located where I live in California they would be several million dollars each. Here’s an example:

As I stood on the sidewalk contemplating this incredible house, the owner came down the driveway towards me.  A long, long driveway.  She was at least 70 years old.  She was wearing a wool cap and a jacket, was at least 100 pounds overweight, and hobbling slowly down to the end of the driveway to put something in the recycling box with the aid of a cane.  It must have taken her at least two minutes to walk the length of her own driveway.  Given the fact that I was walking along at a pretty good clip listening to music on my headphones, the difference between our conditions really struck me.  I am absolutely sure she would be happy to trade her huge, beautiful house for the ability to just effortlessly walk. I am incredibly lucky.  I’ll bet you are, too.    As I entered the Arboretum, I passed by a plaque set in stone next to a pond.  The plaque listed the names of township residents who had been killed in World War II.  Here is a picture of it:
As you can see, around 71 residents of this small town (population today around 37,000) never came back from the war.  To put that into perspective, it’s equivalent, roughly, to New York City having two 9/11-sized events every year for four years. I am incredibly lucky, and you probably are too.    I spent the rest of the hour on a brisk walk through the Arboretum.  It is incredibly beautiful, in the way that only East Coast parks like this can be.  Huge, open lawns with carefully planted rows of trees in the distance – something like a painting of an English country home. The park, it turned out, was laid out by Frederick Law Olmstead himself, perhaps the most famous landscape architect in history.  It is extraordinarily beautiful, and I got to walk through it for free.  Here's a picture of part of it:
I am incredibly lucky.  I’ll bet you are, too.   

Every once in a while, I think it’s important to be reminded of this.

The Secret of Simplicity

I'm reading (or rather listening to, on my iPod) a fascinating new book, entitled Power of Less, by Leo Babauta. Babauta also publishes a great blog, which is here. I think there's a very valuable lesson here for business development. It's all about simplicity.

Babauta's key idea seems to be that the route to success (and happiness) involves ruthlessly eliminating the non-essential, and focusing intensely on doing only the essential. This gets broken down into 6 basic principles:

1. Set limitations

2. Choose the essential

3. Simplify

4. Focus

5. Create habits

6. Start small

The last one, "Start small" was the one that really got my attention.

Starting to develop business is usually a significant change for many people. They often charge into it with heroic intentions, and then, a few weeks later, overwhelmed and frustrated, give up. The key is to start by doing one small, new thing every day until it becomes a habit. Make one phone call. Send one email. Spend ten minutes working on Biz Dev.

You're trying to install a habit, basically, which over time will grow into a full-throttle, effective business development program. However, Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will this. Start small.

Selling: Get Them To The White Board

During a conversation about sales this week with my extremely smart friend Chris, he told me about a sales idea that is both simple and brilliant. It's one of those "Why didn't I think of this?" concepts.

Chris sells extremely large, complex technical consulting projects. As part of this process, he makes very sure to use a whiteboard for any presenting he does, and insures that his prospective customers use it too. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what closes the sale.

Think about it. There's Chris, up at the front of the room. He is at a whiteboard, and he begins do diagram . . . something. It could be the architecture of the network itself. Or the business processes and logic behind it. Or the financial impact of the project. Whatever. Regardless of the subject, he is careful to start building a diagram on the whiteboard with lots of little boxes and circles and arrows and stuff.

And as he works away at this, at some point, he invites one of the prospects to come up to the whiteboard and contribute to the diagram.

This is the Big Moment. First of all, nobody ever says "no" to this. Second, once they're up there, and start adding little boxes and arrows of their own, the entire dynamic of the meeting changes. It is no longer Chris trying to convince them of something. It's Chris and the prospect, working together to solve a problem.

This is a huge shift. Suddenly, the prospect is invested in the situation, and in the proposed solution to the situation. It's now his solution, too.

Whatever you're selling, get the prospect to participate in both defining the problem and crafting the proposed solution. A white board is an excellent way to do this. Once they do, the entire dialogue goes from whether they should work with you to how.

Client Satisfaction Surveys Need Some Salt

Tom Kane had a nice post today on a topic he and I have discussed repeatedly -- client satisfaction surveys. I could not agree more about the critical importance of understanding how your clients feel about the quality of your services. As a matter of fact, I'm in the process of creating a partnership to begin offering client satisfaction assessments as a formalized service myself.

However, I think it's important to recognize the very real limitations of quantitative surveys. And they are quite real. Survey results need to be taken with a grain of salt, or two, or several thousand.

I recently reviewed the results of a survey fielded by a very well-known legal consulting firm which perfectly illustrates what I'm talking about. This survey was not cheap -- it cost the client a LOT.

First of all, the percentage of mailed/emailed surveys that were actually returned was under 30%, which is typical. With this response, you are not getting the entire picture by any means.

Second, the sample size for law firm surveys is usually quite small -- a couple hundred surveys mailed out, at best. If this were Best Buy or Delta Airlines, and you were receiving 2,000 survey responses a month, then you would have enough data to really derive some insights. The smaller the sample size, the less meaningful the data.

Third, most client satisfaction surveys generate some kind of quantified score on a number of different metrics. You know, "Our client satisfaction score was a 4.3 out of a possible 5." The relationship between a client and an attorney is nuanced, highly interpersonal, and very, very complex, to say the least. Reducing it to a number, or even a set of numbers, creates a deceptively precise result. You have to be extremely careful about reading too much into these figures, and especially into relatively minor trends and changes in them over time. It's very hard to quantify a relationship, which is what a quantitative survey does.

Law firms like quantitative surveys because they appear to eliminate ambiguity. Lawyers love precision and specificity, and quantitative surveys seem to deliver both. But that number is a little bit of an illusion. It's a two-dimensional picture of something with many, many dimensions.

Fourth, all clients are not created equal. For midsized firms, at least, the top ten clients tend to provide the bulk of the firm's revenues. Their perceptions are vastly more important to the firm's strategy and profitability than the more numerous, lesser clients. Unless some kind of weighting is applied, small clients will have a disproportionate impact on the final numbers of a quantitative survey.

And, finally, as a great Harvard Business Review article points out, even "satisfied" clients can and will defect. Unless your clients absolutely love your service, are completely satisfied and are willing to say so, they are by no means secure. A client who is a not a "5" in satisfaction is at risk, no matter what the survey percentiles tell you.

The point here is not that surveys are useless -- they're not. They have value. The point is that particularly with key clients, but basically with all clients, there is no substitute for an experienced, emotionally intelligent human being sitting in the same room, asking questions, and listening very carefully to the answer. There just isn't.

Painful, Obvious Lesson Learned

Whenever you are giving a presentation, always, always, always insure that the projection system works. Get there five hours early if you have to, and turn everything on with your own two hands. Even if there's a fancy, high-end projection system, and even if there's allegedly a technician present who is an expert and will insure that everything works.

Do not ask me how I know this.

How Not to Network

I was flying back to San Francisco from the East Coast on Thursday night, and I sat next to a young woman who was, for me, a perfect example of how not to network. I thought it merited a blog post.

Basically, I sat next to her for about four hours, and despite three tries by me to initiate a conversation, she did not take the bait. Specifically, although I volunteered that I had been a lawyer, and was from San Francisco, she did not follow up at all and learned nothing at all about me. A few additional details will explain why this was such a mistake for her.

First, when we sat down, I noticed that she was reading (and highlighting) a casebook on securities law. I learned that she was a third-year law student at the University of Virginia, and she was going to the Bay Area for a Labor Day vacation with some friends. 

Now, it's a reasonably hypothesis that she is interested in a career in transactional law or securities law, given her choice of reading material. It's also a given that she's not easily finding a job, the market being what it is.

I make my living working with law firms. I know hundreds of them. In fact, in three days, I'm giving a talk at a partner's retreat for a firm that describes itself as "[R]esults-based counsel for financial institutions and funds. Innovative securities regulation and enforcement solutions", among other things. I would have been happy to connect her up with some of my clients. I could, and would, have really been an asset to her. But she didn't ask.

I am also, obviously, something of an expert in business development for attorneys. I can almost guarantee that coming straight out of law school, she knows nothing about this, nor does she understand how important it is to her career. If we had talked, I had gotten her to understand how absolutely critical it was to her career, and she had been sharp enough to start developing business her first day on the job, it would have been a major competitive advantage. But I didn't, because she didn't ask.

I also know a lot about San Francisco and the Bay Area. And I knew, for example, that the Bay Bridge was completely shut down this weekend for a massive seismic retrofit, which could have affected her weekend plans to go to Napa. But she didn't ask.

In other words, she unknowingly, and permanently, forfeited a lot of information and opportunities because she didn't even attempt to network in the most ideal situation conceivable. I don't think this was some kind of deliberate slight -- I think she just didn't know any better. Too bad.

One Thought For Better Networking On The Golf Course: Don't

Over at Ford Harding's excellent blog, one of his guest bloggers, Gary Pines, recently posted something I think is absolutely, dead wrong. The post was terrific, if you buy into the premise, which is that the golf course is a good place to network and develop relationships with potential clients.

No, it isn't. I look forward to the debate.

I have not played golf much lately, but in the past, I played a lot. I took many, many lessons, and spent more than my share of time hitting a hundred six-irons in a row for practice. I know what I'm talking about, and in my opinion, Pines overlooks three things:

1. Golf is hard.
2. Bad golf is embarrassing.
3. Most golfers are bad.

A golf course is designed to be played a certain way. For example, on a par 4, there is a section of fairway that, if a golfer is good, is where he will land his tee shot. A good golfer will do that. He'll hit his shot 250 yards, or whatever, and place it right where he needs to to position himself for the next shot, and so on.

A golf swing is a patently unnatural motion. It's very hard to do correctly. If you do it right, the result is magic. An unbelievable amount of power is released, and good golf swing is really beautiful. Look at the illustration of Tiger Woods above. He is in complete control of his swing -- it's balanced, graceful -- perfect, really. He can put the golf ball anywhere he wants. That's why he's Tiger Woods.

Most golfers aren't anything like this. They miss shots -- they hook, slice, shank and so on.  It's not much fun. And any decent golf course is designed to punish shots like this. If you slice a drive, you are going to spend some time in the rough, or the woods, or the water, or the sand, and you will hole out with an 8 on a par 4, or something like it. This is not the best environment for discussing business. A client who sets up for a pitching wedge shot, shanks it into the woods, and then yells out "Shit!" and pounds his club is not going to want to talk. Trust me on this. And with bad, or even mediocre golfers, this happens a lot.

Golf is also physical work. Even if you're using a cart, you still are going to be doing a lot of walking, in the sun, up and down hills, for 4 hours or so. You're going to be sweaty and tired. You're also going to spend a lot of time physically away from your client, as you hit your shot in one place and they hit theirs in another.

Finally, and I guess this is my real point, and kind of grumpy-old-mannish, golf is a very mental game, and requires a lot of mental and emotional discipline, and intense concentration. The absolute last thing I want to be doing on a golf course is chatting with someone.

The ideal networking environment is one in which there is a diversion, but not a distraction, if you understand my meaning. There is some interesting other activity going on, but it's something that isn't too intense, and makes conversation easy. A baseball game, say. A meal. An art exhibit. Not, however, a rock concert. Skiing. Or golf.

My father, who played golf for sixty years, used to have this theory about the ideal versus the real. He believed that when thinking about how well they played -- how far they would hit, say, a four-iron -- golfers always instinctively think of the best shot they ever hit, and then assume that's their normal shot. If just once, you manage to loft a flawless wedge over trees, drop it right onto the green, and then have enough backspin to stop the ball right next to the hole for an easy putt, you will believe you always hit wedges like that. You don't.

Similarly, the ideal golf round with a client is one in which the course is beautiful, you are both relaxed and having fun, the weather is beautiful, and there is time for lots of relationship-building chatting between holes, on the green, and so on.

Realty is different. Very, very different. And because of that, I would reduce Gary's ten tips to one: "Don't."

A New and Improved Elevator Pitch

 Nice little post from Seth Godin today, which made me think of the content of the elevator pitch.

In case you're not familiar with it, the elevator pitch is your self-introduction, in which, in thirty seconds or so (the time it takes to talk to a stranger in a descending elevator before arriving at the lobby, hence the name) you tell who you are, what you do and why it matters.

 Godin's point which, as usual, is dead-on, is that we tend to tell the same stories over and over without revising or updating them. Mistake.

My business is markedly different than it was a year ago, as are most people's. Therefore, simply repeating the same pitch isn't a good idea. It's not really accurate, and it's probably not that compelling, either.

Thanks, Seth.